This Project
This project aims to be as simple as it can.
The first basic premise is a long walk, continued for as many months as we muster.
Secondly, we sing. We collect and arrange traditional songs from wherever we can, and give them back as performances in every town and village through which we pass.
This is not a tour, nor a re-enactment of historic minstrelsy. It is just a singing walk.
Neither is it an easy alternative, a sly escape from everyday life. Always moving on, sleeping out in all weathers, sourcing and carrying water and food, cooking and washing, these are not simple matters without the convenience of a stable home. But a reach for freedom requires systematic discipline.
We sustain ourselves from a trinity of sources: the kit we carry in our backpacks; the abundance that is everywhere; and the kind help of friends, new and old.
Of course, the key to living outside is none of the above, but lies in the accumulation and honing of skills and knowledge. Even in the right place, carrying the right equipment – you’ve still got to know how to use what you’ve got.
On a personal level, we are keen to learn much more about wild-food, herbal medicine, and traditional outdoor life and crafts, the common precedents for our adventures. These bodies of knowledge were built, by slow genius and heroic effort, by your ancestors and ours. From the basis these provided, have sprung our species’ best modern advancements. Bushcraft is civilizing, and it is evolutionary.
So with these aims, to walk, sing, meet and learn, we are set out to encounter Britain’s multiple landscapes of dream, history, culture and nature. We want to learn what we can from each of these, and follow the journey’s hinting prompts, as they arise. And we want to share what we find, to tell everyone we can that this land is not threatening, spoiled, dull, nor depressed. It is vibrant and beautiful; it is your best characteristic.
